Decline in Real Estate Sales Much Greater Than Reported
Real Estate Sales
When the major services want the latest on real estate trends they almost inevitably report (verbatum) the news release from the National Association of Realtors. Personally, I’ve never seen any news service question the accurracy of the NAR Statistics, at least until now.
CoreLogic, collects public and private sector data and has more than 10,000 employees.
For 2010, NAR’s figures show sales of existing homes fell 5 percent. On the other hand, CoreLogic estimates that home sales actually fell 12 percent! Yes, CoreLogic’s figures were more than double the NAR reported sales drop.
The big question in real estate is the unsold home inventory on the market today. NAR put out an estimate of 9.5 months to sell unsold inventory on the market in November. CoreLogic says the unsold inventory on the market in November represented 16 months of supply!
So, is it possible that the NAR sales have been purposefully skewed to create a impression of a milder decline than the CoreLogic reports show? Or, is the discrepancy between the two reports just a matter of the different methodology used to collect the data?
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